Safety-Driven Company Culture
It is our mission to hire bus drivers and other team members who share our values of compassion, safety, and customer service, and we promote this culture of safety through our training, best practices, and daily touchpoints.
Birnie Bus is one of the few New York State third-party CDL testers, and we were one of the first to endorse and implement the state’s required training. As pioneers in this, we have extensive understanding in the qualifications necessary to pass CDL testing, and to succeed as a professional driver.
Driver Training Program
Thorough and professional training is critical to a driver’s confidence in their job. Each driver we employ is required to attend the annual driver training administered on a state level. Additionally, our drivers must complete training each year using the nationally-recognized program, The Driver Training Course. This is a comprehensive system covering everything a bus driver needs to know, while preparing them to manage passengers with the utmost safety and care.
We also provide semi-annual safety classes with all operations personnel, designed to stay up-to-date with changing regulations, as well as to rectify and address any concerns identified by our customers and partners.
Mandatory Safety Meetings
We provide our employees with quality training material throughout the year, with a series of campaigns that highlight specific topics during our mandatory monthly safety meetings. The series focuses on key months of the school year with material that includes meeting presentations and quizzes, videos, prevention tips and safety reminders, printable safety activities, and more.
We also conduct bi-monthly service meetings with our Operations Managers, Dispatchers, Area General Managers, Transportation Managers, and VP of Operations to discuss events of the previous two weeks and brainstorm how to eliminate or reduce unsafe behaviors and activities. These meetings can also be utilized to discuss concerns of parents, teachers, and district administration.
Safety Screening & Compliance
We implement secure, digital platforms for our driver screening and compliance processes with built-in company safety standards to systematically evaluate candidates, and to ensure employee credentialing is always up-to-date. We perform rigorous background checks, review driving history records, and administer substance screenings for all bus school bus drivers before they are assigned to a route for our customers.
10 Steps to Obtain Your CDL!
Our driver hiring program, “Join Team Birnie”, attracts entry-level and seasoned applicants, yearning to be among the best and doing what it takes to become professional drivers. These hiring safety standards result in premier and reliable bus drivers, with program benchmarks including:
